Regular reader Arun pointed out an interesting article to me:

Michael,
Check out (http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/04/28/10-most-important-technologies-you-never-think-about_1.html) for the 10 most important technologies you never think about... it has Unicode at #1 (or is it #10, I'm not sure!)

Btw, the 'Days left in office' in your sidebar spooked me until I realized you were referring to Dubya and not yourself!

Cheers,
Arun

I have to agree it is nice to see Unicode in the pole position of this list entitled The 10 most important technologies you never think about (Without these technologies our world would be a very different place).

The list is unordered, though since it is listed first and it is not first in alphabetical order, I am inclined to guess that mit might be first for a reason. :-)

The text goes:

Unicode
We use computers for every kind of communication, from IM to e-mail to writing the Great American Novel. The trouble is, computers don't speak our language. They're all digital; before they can store or process text, every letter, symbol, and punctuation mark must first be translated into numbers.

So which numbers do we use? Early PCs relied on a code called ASCII, which took care of most of the characters used in Western European languages. But that's not enough in the age of the World Wide Web. What about Cyrillic, Hindi, or Thai?

Enter Unicode, the Rosetta Stone of computing. The Unicode standard defines a unique number for every letter, symbol, or glyph in more than 30 written languages, and it's still growing. At nearly 1,500 pages and counting, it's incredibly complex, but it's been gaining traction ever since Microsoft adopted it as the internal encoding for the  Windows NT family of operating systems.

Most of us will never need to know which characters map to which Unicode numbers, but modern computing could scarcely do without Unicode. In fact, it's what's letting you read this article in your Web browser, right now.

Kind of says most of it if not all of it. :-)

The full list is also interesting; take a look if you are curious about what else Neil McAllister put on this top 10 list....

 

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